Home Office {Before & After}

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Previous owners of our home had enclosed the garage and created two bedrooms. We are using one of those bedrooms as a home office. I finished this room last summer, but never wrote anything about it. Now I’m thinking about redoing this room a little bit, so figured I’d write about the original changes before changing it up again.

The room was originally painted off-white with off-white trim and doors. I painted the walls gray using Behr Premium Plus Ultra matte/flat Sparrow (Behr – 780F-4). I used Behr Premium Plus Ultra matte/flat Full Moon (Behr – 780E-2) on the ceiling. The trim and doors were painted with Behr Premium Plus Ultra satin Ultra Pure White. The interior of the closet was painted with Behr Premium Plus Ultra matte Ultra Pure White.

This room has a concrete floor. The floor originally had two coats of paint on it, the bottom coat was red and the top coat was black. The floor was scuffed up pretty bad, so I wanted to repaint it. This was a big job because I had to first strip off the paint that was on the floor. It took a lot longer than I had hoped it would, but the bottom layer of red paint was hard to remove. After finally removing the paint, I used Behr Cleaner & Etcher to prep the floor. I used Behr Decorative Concrete Dye on the floor, hoping it would adhere to the concrete better than regular paint. I put two light coats of Industrial Gray and then two light coats of Arctic Black. I used a paint roller for the gray, and I used a large sponge to apply the black dye. I applied two coats of Behr Low-Lustre Sealer to help protect the concrete floor. The floor looks okay, but the dye doesn’t stick to the floor well. Moving stuff back into the room and rearranging, I dinged up the floor in a couple of places and realized it peels up like latex paint. Not at all what I was hoping for, so I’m disappointed with the floor in this room. It was a lot of work, so I’m not in a hurry to remove this paint and try something else. I’ll be living with it for a while, and hopefully, it doesn’t get too messed up.

Other improvements were:
– Hired someone to remove the popcorn ceiling.
– Replaced the ceiling vent register.
– Placed LED light bulbs in the ceiling fan and the closet light fixture.
– Replaced the ceiling fan pulls.
– Replaced the bronze door knob on the office door with a Baldwin satin nickel knob.
– Replaced the bronze door knobs on the closet doors with Baldwin satin nickel dummy knobs.
– Replaced the bronze door hinges on all three doors with satin nickel hinges.
– Replaced the ball catches on the closet doors.
– Installed a new doorstop for the office door.
– Replaced the windows.
– Removed the blinds.

We hired an electrician to update the electrical work in our house. For this room, that was:
– Replaced the outlets with white decorator outlets.
– Replaced the toggle light switch with a white decorator rocker switch.
– Replaced the cable outlet with a white decorator coax.
– Replaced the phone jack with a white decorator jack.
– Had hardwired smoke/carbon monoxide alarms installed in the house – one alarm was placed in this room.
– Replaced and moved the breaker box. An old breaker box that was a bit of a fire hazard (it was a recalled model) was in the closet of this room. Since we needed to replace the breaker box, we had them move it to a safer location too. This was a big part of the electrical work we had done before we moved in the house.

I’m happy with the room, though I wish the concrete dye had worked on the floor. At first, I thought the room would be too cluttered with the bookshelves, desk, and chair, but it seems kind of cozy. This room gives me a great area to work on the computer and take care of household management items and small projects in a nice, organized space. We already had the bookshelves and oversized chair, but we bought the desk. I wanted a simple desk, and this one matches the bookshelves.